Remote Australia haunts Paul Daley. We saw that memorably in the opening paragraphs of his chapter in The Honest History Book (2017), as he explored a massacre site in Queensland:
I know the spirits are out here. And when the wind starts to howl across the plain in great booming gusts, it might just be the sound of them crying. I’ve visited many massacre sites in Australia. But usually I’ve been in the company of a local Indigenous custodian, someone who rubbed their scent on my face and hands and chanted to warn the spirits that this white man comes in peace. (240)
We saw it again in his tour-de-force novel Jesustown (2022), which intertwined a gripping family story with a tale of human frailty and the damaging consequences of anthropology without ethics:
Our people were stolen from their resting places in their own country in their tens of thousands [says First Australian, Jericho]. This whole continent is a massive crime scene. And you’re talking about your beloved fucken Anzacs all buried so nicely under rows of neat little white stones in clipped-lawn cemeteries and cared for by Commonwealth gardeners. And there’s the big memorial for them in Canberra. Our people are in cardboard boxes and jars. Some were on display in glass cabinets in museums, in Australia and overseas. Where’s the comparison? (252-53)
Now, Daley has given us The Leap, where fragile and lonely British diplomat, Benedict Fotheringham-Gaskill (he prefers ‘Ben Gaskill’), is sent to far Western New South Wales to persuade the local many-generations landowner, Cecil Sloper, to accept financial compensation for the mysterious death in Saudi Arabia of his beloved daughter, Charlene. The alternative is ritual execution for the two British women possibly responsible for the death.
One of the characters introduces us to the town:
The Leap … Think three-fifths of the way to the middle of fucking nowhere. Pioneering grazing family. Once hallowed farming country gone to shit. Rabbit plagues and feral pigs. Never-ending drought. Full of Flat Earth Party-voting, climate-change-denying, God-bothering, gun-nut, ground-zero, wife-beating, racist, fundamentalist fuckers. (65)
The Leap’s main street is Gallipoli Way, with the inevitable war memorial. ‘Yeah. Whitefella war memorial’, says First Nations man Nelson Tyson, who befriends Ben. ‘Anzac Day’s the biggest date of the year round here. That and twenty-six January. Bigger than Christmas.’ (132)
The town takes its name from a high point nearby. Daley borrows from the history of the Appin Massacre of 1816, where First Nations people were forced over a cliff to their deaths. He has often returned to the Appin story; he uses it again to show how The Leap got its name.
Is Daley’s novel derivative? Four of the book’s puffs mention Wake in Fright, the 1961 novel by Kenneth Cook which became Ted Kotcheff’s 1971 film with Gary Bond as a bemused and soon very bedraggled and rattled schoolteacher, Chips Rafferty a venomous policeman, Donald Pleasence the local alcoholic, with Jack Thompson, John Meillon and others. Through the mists of decades these characters seem very much like those in The Leap, except for Daley’s sympathetically-portrayed First Nations people, who seem eminently human and humane.
Daley acknowledges his debt to Wake in Fright, which he first read as a teenager. ‘The book and the movie vividly evoke a landscape of physical and social malevolence’, he writes in the acknowledgements, ‘with their acute critiques of Australian class and the divide between urbane coastal life and the interior’s dark heart’. (270)
The larger point, though, is that The Leap, Wake in Fright, Wolf Creek, and other works, some of them non-fiction like the late Ross Gibson’s Seven Versions of an Australian Badland (2002), Kate Grenville’s Unsettled (2025), and Mark McKenna’s Looking for Blackfellas’ Point (2002), all address White Australian wariness, even fear, about relating to that Wide Brown Land, the land that was stolen from First Nations people, much of its history submerged in the Great Australian Silence.
The Leap is a medium-sized town with no secrets, just deliberately forgotten truths [Nelson tells Ben]. There’s just this bloody massive blind eye about a whole lotta difficult stuff that’s been purposely disremembered by the so-called pioneer families, and then afterwards by everyone else from the cops to the papers and the politicians. And that’s to do with how the settlers murdered the Blackfellas and stole their land and named the place in celebration of it – and they’ve never eased up on us descendants since. It was a war from the very beginning and there’s been no peace. No settlement. Reconciliation – pfft! (153)
On the cover of The Leap are the words, ‘They’re watching’. These words could refer to some of the frankly weird residents of this at once desiccated and booze-drenched town, watching and threatening the dithering and discombobulated Gaskill. Or we could let the watching ‘They’ be the spirits that Daley saw and felt in those breezes in Queensland. That makes more sense.
Daley works on several levels, which makes the book a pleasure to read and savour while leaving a slightly uneasy aftertaste. Are places like The Leap all White Australia has to show for 237 years of occupation?
Look, though, for the evocative descriptions of Bondi, Canberra, The Leap itself, and Australia under the bushfire smoke of early 2020, with Covid just around the corner. (Prime Minister Morrison has an anonymous, but mercifully brief, cameo.)
Finally, in the frantic last few pages, there’s a sting in the tail, one which I totally failed to see coming, which reminds us that Daley is an accomplished yarn-spinner as well as a chronicler of our unresolved post-colonial, stolen land. This is a morality tale about our Country but it is a thriller as well.
Paul Daley writes about his book. He launched the Honest History website in 2013, is one of that website's distinguished Supporters and is now a distinguished Supporter of the Defending Country site. His many publications can be found using the Search function on either site. He dedicated his 2018 book On Patriotism to Honest History.
This review appears also on our sister site, Honest History.
Picture credit: book cover detail
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